“Please don’t take this the wrong way — I have to salute the Chinese for what they did,” Clapper said of the OPM data hack at a conference of Geospatial Intelligence experts. "If we had the opportunity to do that, I think we wouldn’t hesitate for a minute."
Clapper was directly asked to comment on the OPM incident, where the data of millions of US federal government workers was mined in a cyber attack.
The national intelligence director confirmed that China is perceived as the “leading suspect” in the massive US government cyber theft.
In early June 2015, OPM revealed that its network had been hacked. The perpetrator of the OPM attack was able to steal millions of US citizens’ personal records, including information given by US officials for security clearances.
